Challenge

As a teacher's son, Vishen understands the value of education. After excelling in school, Vishen built a successful Silicon Valley career, but his life changed when he started to meditate. He quit his job, and after studying and teaching meditation globally, launched Mindvalley. By enlisting global experts to teach meditation and hundreds of other classes about holistic self-improvement, Vishen intended to fill gaps in traditional education programmes and help make a better world.

Vishen's vision caught on. By 2021, Mindvalley's billing and subscription management solution couldn't deliver needed capabilities fast enough to keep up with the needs of 20 million customers and the company's 40% annual growth rate. IT teams were having to integrate third-party products to fill in feature gaps such as global tax management tools, and introducing new offers usually involved coding and custom app development. It took a third party provider eight months to add subscription upgrade and downgrade capabilities.

To meet demand and further accelerate growth in 135 countries, Mindvalley had to easily evolve how it managed global subscriptions, payments, tax compliance, and checkout flows. Finance and marketing decision-makers needed greater insight into key performance indicators such as monthly recurring revenue, net revenue retention, and customer churn. They wanted to be able to adjust subscriptions and other offers without the help of IT teams, and provide customers with self-service subscription management tools. Mindvalley also wanted to support more payment methods and eventually accept payments in currencies other than the US dollar. The company knew it couldn't achieve all of this with its existing billing and subscription management solution, but changing providers introduced uncertainty that made Mindvalley's leadership wary.

“People were opposed to the idea of migrating to a new billing system because we had been using our previous solution for almost 12 years and there were a lot of systems built on top of it,” said Rafay Korai, head of B2C marketing at Mindvalley. “The team was also concerned about how long the migration would take because it had to be flawless. Any error could cost us millions of dollars.”

Solution

Mindvalley decided to replace its existing billing and subscription management system with Stripe and engaged Stripe professional services as a strategic partner to help with the migration and manage much of the heavy lifting.

“We wanted one platform that could handle everything out of the box, including billing, payments, taxes, revenue recognition, and checkout – and it needed to be easy to customise and scale to support our growth,” said Korai. “Stripe provided that, including a professional services team that understood the best way to migrate to a new platform and tweak processes.”

Working as a team with Stripe professional services, Mindvalley deployed Stripe Billing to simplify and automate global billing, subscription, and revenue management. With Billing, Mindvalley gained no-code tools to modify subscriptions and dunning or trial periods, and could enable self-service subscription management for customers. To simplify the migration of customers' subscriptions to Billing, engineers used the Billing migration toolkit. “Writing our own scripts would have added a level of complexity, so the Billing migration toolkit was really helpful,” said Korai.

During its migration to Billing, Mindvalley decided to use Stripe products wherever possible and continued its engagement with Stripe professional services to help implement them. Engineers used Stripe Connect to integrate Mindvalley's platform with Stripe and adopted Stripe Payments to process all global payments. By embedding Stripe into its platform with Connect, Mindvalley could keep customers on its site during the payment process, offload instructor payouts to Stripe, and simplify future product integrations.

Mindvalley worked with Stripe professional services to configure Payments to process Mindvalley's global payments using Google Pay, Alipay, and Apple Pay methods as well as 3D Secure authentication, which would minimise fraud and ensure regulatory compliance. Engineers used Stripe Revenue Recognition, a built-in tool in Payments, to automate complex accrual accounting processes – including subscription upgrades and downgrades, prorations, and refunds – and gain a single view of revenue streams to understand drivers behind growth and churn. They also implemented Stripe Tax to manage global tax compliance processes for finance teams and to automatically calculate the appropriate amount of tax that customers would need to pay based on their location.

To improve customer experience, Mindvalley and Stripe professional services implemented Stripe Checkout. With Checkout, Mindvalley could use Stripe's single, pre-built payment form to reduce checkout friction, automatically support the 60 languages that Mindvalley's customers speak, and minimise development requirements. The engineers also added Stripe Elements, pre-built UI modules in Stripe's Optimised Checkout Suite, to further simplify payment, checkout, refund, and billing customisations. For example, the engineers used the Payment Element to enable a secure one-click checkout flow with Link, which auto-fills payment details for customers who have already enrolled with Link.

In the future, Mindvalley will use Elements to meet its long-term payment goals. IT teams can use Elements to support more than 40 payment methods and 135 currencies without having to write any code.

For continuous, on-demand support, Mindvalley opted to use Stripe Premium Support. The plan provides Mindvalley with its own designated support specialists, technical resources for integration reviews, and proactive reporting, insights, and recommendations.

“With Stripe Premium Support, we can make the best use of emerging Stripe capabilities so we can achieve our innovation goals,” said Korai.

Results

Mindvalley migrates 150,000+ customers on time, without errors

By partnering with Stripe to implement a new billing and subscription management solution, Mindvalley reduced risk and saved time.

“We've had an incredible experience implementing Stripe and working with our Stripe professional services team,” said Korai. “We were able to effectively migrate over 150,000 customers from our existing subscription management system to Stripe within the two-year timeframe we projected, without making a single mistake.”

Mindvalley reduced involuntary churn by 3%

Mindvalley now has the in-depth insights and easy-to-use tools it needs to make informed decisions about how to improve customer experience. The company has already used insights from Stripe to adjust its offerings and processes and drive over $1 million in new revenue.

“With Stripe Billing and Revenue Recognition, we were able to test and measure what happened to monthly recurring revenue and net revenue retention when we changed our dunning period,” said Korai. “By changing it from 7 days to 30 days, we reduced involuntary customer churn by 3%. That's a big number when you consider our yearly revenue is $150 million.”

Mindvalley also decreased refunds from 17% to 12% by improving checkout, as well as refund processes using Checkout and Elements.

“Even a 1% reduction in refunds would be a lot for us given our business volume, so reducing refunds by 5% is incredible,” said Korai.

Employees and customers are empowered to achieve their goals

With Stripe, Mindvalley dramatically reduced complexity, lowered operational costs, and improved its ability to drive growth. Business teams can now quickly modify subscriptions and other product options using Billing, without involving IT teams or engaging third party providers for custom apps. This gives IT teams more time to innovate now that they can spend less time writing code and managing software updates. Customers can also manage their own subscription choices on demand rather than having to contact Mindvalley, saving time and improving the experience for customers as well as employees.

“Having everything under one Stripe umbrella really helps us simplify processes,” said Korai. “Now we have the right tools in hand to rapidly scale and grow our incredible global community – and teach more people the life skills they need to live happy, fulfilled lives.”